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One year into his MLB career, Yasiel Puig is even better than we thought

(PHOTO: Harry How/Getty Images)

(PHOTO: Harry How/Getty Images)

Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of Yasiel Puig’s arrival in the big leagues, and yet the Dodgers’ 23-year-old outfielder continues to disrespect baseball. Many baseballs, actually — practically every one that’s thrown to him. In his second season in the Majors, Puig is hitting .340 with a .430 on-base percentage and a .606 slugging percentage.

You’d never see Derek Jeter show up opposing pitchers like that.

The noise and nonsense surrounding Puig from the day he hit the circuit might still somehow overwhelm what he has actually done on baseball fields around the country, but it should not. Puig is way more than the guy who dances in the dugout and flips his bat away in triumph after all long fly balls and stays in the game after taking a fastball to the face. He is a legit offensive force off to a historically great start.

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By the park- and league-adjusted stat OPS+, Puig is the active leader among Major League hitters with at least 500 plate appearances at 169. If he can maintain that rate through the end of the year, his mark will be the second best all time of any hitter through his first two seasons. The only guy ahead of him, Frank Thomas, just got elected to the Hall of Fame.

And though there’s lots of time for Puig to see his offensive production regress and ultimately decline, if he can somehow sport that 169 OPS+ for an entire career, it will place him among the top 10 hitters of all time, just behind the likes of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Lou Gehrig, Rogers Hornsby and Mickey Mantle.

Did you hear that? Ruth, Williams, Bonds, Gehrig, Hornsby and Mantle. Again: Ruth, Williams, Bonds, Gehrig, Hornsby, and Mantle!

If you stand among the last remaining Puig skeptics, those hung up both the actual and illusory habits that made him so divisive in his rookie season, you need to start preparing for the possibility that you were — and are — very, very wrong.

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Because everything about Puig’s sophomore season suggests he has made real adjustments to improve as a baseball player. He is walking more often and striking out less. He is chasing far fewer pitches outside the strike zone, and, not surprisingly, making more contact. By almost all accounts, he is hitting the cutoff man more often and making fewer egregious baserunning blunders.

It makes sense, provided you can divorce reality from the narrative that held that Puig was too stubborn and too cocky to ever learn to be better. After all, the guy only played a total of 63 minor league games before hitting the Majors, and only 40 above A-ball –- all of them at Class AA Chattanooga in 2013.

Heck, it has been less than two years since Puig even arrived on American soil after signing a seven-year, $42 million Major League contract with Los Angeles that prompted many in the sport to wonder what the Dodgers could be thinking. At that time, scouts said Puig was “out of baseball condition” after missing the 2010-11 Serie Nacional season in Cuba due to disciplinary reasons – either because of an attempted defection or, more likely, because he shoplifted tennis shoes from a Dutch mall during a tournament in the Netherlands.

The stat I used above to demonstrate Puig’s excellence needs more context, certainly: If Puig were drafted out of high school, like many American players, or signed as an international free agent, like Dominican and Venezuelan players, he likely would have reached the Majors sometime before 2013. At a younger age, he’d be unlikely to post the type of numbers he did in his rookie season, so his career rate stats would be lower.

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But then that exact same context renders Puig’s accomplishments so much more impressive. While there’s no easy route to Major League stardom, his started in a place so utterly foreign to the average American baseball fan that it’s likely impossible for us to fully conceive all the mental and physical and geopolitical hurdles he had to leap to get here.

What we know, at least based on a Los Angeles magazine feature from April, is that Puig defected with the help of profiteering smugglers connected to a Mexican drug cartel, who held Puig and three others captive in a Cancun motel room for weeks and threatened to cut off parts of his body with machetes if they didn’t get paid.

That’s not ancient history, or some deeply buried part of Puig’s backstory. That happened two years ago. As recently as spring training of 2013, according to an ESPN report, men representing the smugglers were showing up at Puig’s hotel room door to demand money and deliver threats.

People better informed than me might sit and ponder what Puig’s defection story — and thousands of less-heralded ones like it — say about U.S. immigration policy and foreign relations. But as a baseball fan first and foremost, I can only think of how heartbreaking it is to know that there were forces in this world working to prevent the biggest possible audience from enjoying the beautiful spectacle of Yasiel Puig playing baseball, and some that reduced his million-dollar talent to swiping sneakers from a mall.

GIF via @CJZero

GIF via @CJZero

Maybe someday, when feels safe and comfortable doing so, Puig will open up about the strange and terrifying particulars of his journey from Cienfuegos to Los Angeles. Until then, our imaginations will run with the fury of Puig rounding second as we try to wrap our minds around what it must be like to come from where he did, through what he did, to where he is.

Because there seems to be a certain electrifying defiance to Puig’s play, the way he flouts our expectations of a young Major Leaguer and what he should be capable of, and flouts the sport’s silly unwritten rules and normal human limitations and, sometimes, the cutoff man.

And we can feel in it — and in his delightful Instagrams, and his reported appreciation for the Three Stooges, and his video-game celebrations, and his Little League outreach — a magnetic type of joy that we can only guess must come with being young and free and handsome and rich and unspeakably awesome at baseball.

All of the hype surrounding Yasiel Puig, as it turns out, was deserved: At 23, and only 22 months into his American professional baseball career, he is one of the sport’s most breathtaking, most charismatic, and best players.

Look at him go.

(Via @BuzzFeedSports)

(Via @BuzzFeedSports)

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